Our office is chaotic this week as the newsroom is emptied to facilitate building repairs. I'll be one of the last ones moved out to my temporary new digs -- by a window looking out on Linden Street! -- and I'm already feeling lonely in here, particularly since I dismantled the Hall of Fame and there's nothing on my walls anymore.

Today’s movie list was inspired by Allentown’s Amanda Seyfried, subject of a nice feature in Thursday’s Morning Call feature section and starring in a new action film. I still remember Amanda from vocal recitals when she was much younger and she and my son had the same Allentown voice teacher, Gail Grossman.

I wrote in Saturday’s column about the group Muslims and Christians United, which among other things has been meeting once a month to discuss issues involving the Muslim and Christian faiths. I promised to provide more information about its next meeting, which will focus on "The Truth and Myth of Sharia (Islamic Law.)" I’ve repeated the press release below.

I promised to share the story of My Worst Date. As it happens, I published it more than 20 years ago in a column that ran only in selected editions of the paper, then repeated an abridged version 12 years ago to encourage readers to report on their own worst dates.

If you feel as I do that Pennsylvania needs to change its statutes of limitation for child sex abuse, here's a link to a petition urging committee chairs in the state Legislature to stop blocking two important bills from consideration.

My column today is the first of two Looove Connection columns about readers’ worst dates. Unfortunately, I’d need much more space than that to share all the responses to my recent inquiry for bad date stories, so I’m hijacking the blog for the next few days so I can run some of them in full.

Outside of serving as the inspiration for a generation of misguided oversingers who can't carry her microphone, what has Whitney Houston done in the last 15 years except make her fans sad? My guess is that there are young people out there wondering why people are making such a big deal about her death.

People used to remark that the commercials always seemed to be better than the Super Bowl. The games have been terrific in recent years, and the commercials not so much, so I hope we can put this one to rest.

Dennis Pearson is best known as the guy who seems to be running for everything and never winning. Most recently, he was one of several candidates for an Allentown City Council appointment, but they picked somebody else.